Victims

The entire gypsy camp at Auschwitz, of 4000 people, was exterminated
on August 1, 1944:

Set up as a family camp, the Gypsy unit rapidly deteriorated
and became extraordinarily filthy and unhygienic even for
Auschwitz, a place of starving babies, children and adults. B. insisted that
there were "sufficient rations...delivered to the camp for all of them
to survive", but that certain adult Gypsies of high standing kept
most of the food, thus denying it to all others, including
hungry children. The Auschwitz leaders, "shocked" by the situation,
came to the conclusion that it was virtually impossible to
change it and that the only solution was to "gas the entire camp."
According to B., Mengele strongly opposed that decision,
made several trips to Berlin to try and get it reversed, and went so
far as to declare to other Auschwitz authorities that annihilating
the Gypsy camp would be "a crime."

[Most other sources agree that Mengele was
in favor of killing the Gypsies.]

Prisoner doctors who had worked there at the time told me
that Mengele seemed to be all over the camp at once that
day, actively supervising arrangements for getting
the Gypsies to the gas chamber. He had been
close to some of the Gypsy children-- bringing them food and candy,
sometimes little toys, and taking them for brief outings.
Whenever he appeared, they would greet him warmly with
the cry, "Onkel ['Uncle'] Mengele!" But that day,
the children were frightened. Dr. Alexander O. described
the scene and one child's plea to Mengele:

Mengele arrived at around eight o'clock or seven-thirty. It
was day-light. He came, and then the children....A Gypsy girl of eleven,
twelve,....the oldest [child] of a whole family--maybe thirteen, with
malnutrition sometimes they grow less. "Onkel Mengele
[she calls], my little brother cries himself to death. We
do not know where our mother is. He cries himself to death, Onkel Mengele!"
Where did she go to complain? To Mengele--to the one she loves
and knows she is loved by, because he loved them. His answer:
"Willst du die Schnauze halten!" He said it in a common, vulgar
way....but...with a sort of tenderness..."Why don't you shut your
little trap!"

Others told how Mengele combed the blocks, tracking down Gypsy children
who had hidden, and how he himself transported a group of those
children in a car to the gas chamber--drawing upon their trust for
him and speaking tenderly and reassuringly to them until the end.

Lifton, pp. 323; 185-186.

I went out again and went to the block where my children were.
They were only skin and bone, unrecognizable. They lay there, one can
say, already dying. And so I said to my father, bring the children
to the sick bay, bring the children in, I said, I will see
what I can do. Had they come in there earlier, it might have
made a difference. And so my father brought in the eldest the next day,
she was ten. And when I saw her, she could not speak a word anymore.
She only lay there, her eyes open, and not a word. Could only
lie there, was more dead than...only breathed. So I spoke to her...
then she died. They simply threw her there, with the other corpses.
My own child.

And so one after the other. The one, she was six, was already dead when
I came there. I did not see her anymore. Not long after, the other one
died too. They were only skin and bones. Skin and bones, nothing else, one could count
the ribs. The eyes so deep in the head. The children were dead, all
three.

Testimony of a Gypsy woman survivor of the Gypsy family camp,Anatomy, p. 452.

This is the reason why three-year-old Emilia died: the historical
necessity of killing the children of Jews was self-demonstrative to
the Germans. Emilia, daughter of Aldo Levi of Milan, was a curious, ambitious, cheerful,
intelligent child; her parents had succeeded in washing her during
the journey in the packed car in a tub with tepid water which the degenerate
German engineer had allowed them to draw from the engine that was dragging us all
to death.

Thus, in an instant, our women, our parents, our children disappeared.
We saw them for a short while as an obscure mass at the other end of
the platform; then we saw nothing more.

Levi, Survival p. 20.

The three victims mounted together onto the chairs.

The three necks were placed at the same moment within the nooses.

"Long live liberty!" cried the two adults.

But the child was silent.

"Where is God? Where is He?" someone behind me asked.

At a sign from the head of the camp, the three chairs tipped over...

Then the march past began. The two adults were no longer alive.
Their tongues hung swollen, blue-tinged. But the third rope was still moving;
being so light, the child was still alive...

For more than half an hour he stayed there, struggling between
life and death, dying in slow agony under our eyes. And we had
to look him full in the face. He was still alive when I passed
in front of him. His tongue was still red, his eyes were not yet
glazed.

Behind me, I heard the same man asking:

"Where is God now?"

And I heard a voice within me answer him:

"Where is He? Here He is--He is hanging here on this gallows..."

That night the soup tasted of corpses.

Wiesel, p. 72.

The number of people murdered at Auschwitz is an open question.
The best estimate is that 1.1 million died there, 90% of them Jews.

Immediately after the war, Soviet and Polish commissions reported
four million victims of the camp; Camp Commandant Rudolf Hoss
testified that three million died there.

It is impossible to ascertain exactly how many people were at
Auschwitz for two reasons. First of all, no records were kept
of people murdered after
selections at the train station; they were never assigned numbers
or entered into camp records but vanished into what the Nazis
themselves called "night and fog" ("nacht und nebel"). Secondly,
the Nazis destroyed many records before abandoning Auschwitz.

Scholars such as Franciszek Piper, writing in Anatomy, pp.
61-76, arrive at their estimates by looking at the more accurate records
of people deported to Auschwitz from various countries, and then subtracting
the number of people known to have been transferred to other camps or to
have survived the war.

Based on these calculations (1,300,000 deportees minus 200,000 survivors),
at least 1,100,000 persons were killed or died in the camp.

Piper, p. 71.

Franciszek Gajnowiczek....is a stooped, gray-haired man who has
survived Auschwitz to testify that when he was selected at random
for execution one day in 1941, a Franciscan priest named Maximilian
Kolbe stepped forward and volunteered to take his place, and did
take his place and did die. (The Vatican in due time proclaimed
Kolbe to be beatified and well on the way to sainthood.)

This site is intended for educational purposes to teach about the Holocaust and
to combat hatred.
Any statements or excerpts found on this site are for educational purposes only.

As part of these educational purposes, Nizkor may
include on this website materials, such as excerpts from the writings of racists and antisemites. Far from approving these writings, Nizkor condemns them and
provides them so that its readers can learn the nature and extent of hate and antisemitic discourse. Nizkor urges the readers of these pages to condemn racist
and hate speech in all of its forms and manifestations.